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'Three Kingdoms' review or 'Lost and found in translation.'

'Three
Kingdoms', Simon Stephens

Lyric
Theatre, Tuesday 8th May 2012

Written
for Culture Wars

All
theatre involves detective work. Regardless of genre or content,
every play requires an audience to piece together the evidence and
answer the question: what is this piece about? A murder mystery,
then, could be seen as theatre boiled down to its most basic but
essential form. This genre still asks us to find meaning – it's
just a lot more open about its purpose.

What
Simon Stephens has done, with his extraordinary play, 'Three
Kingdoms', is to take this stripped down genre and add layer, upon
layer, upon layer, until the stage is cloudy with clues and
confusion. Stephens has returned to theatre's basic roots – the
search for meaning – and planted new, exotic seeds. He has dug deep
and, with the help of visionary director Sebastian Nübling,
allowed theatre to climb and bend and twist in any which way it
pleases. He has given British theatre the chance to grow.

The
play begins in a fairly conventional fashion, which is perhaps why so
many British theatre critics have failed to 'get' this piece,
searching for the sort of coherence this play never sets out to
provide. We open in a Hammersmith police station, where two British
detectives are struggling with a gruesome case. They have discovered
the severed head of a Russian lady, washed up on the Thames. Through
their interrogations, the detectives learn this headless lady was
ensnared in an international sex-trafficking ring. They travel to
Germany, and later Estonia, in an attempt to hunt down the
head-hacking, head honcho. The detectives' path, then, is relatively
straight forward – but the production does not follow them.
Instead, it scuttles along its own, insanely twisted path, packed
with dark alleys and terrifying dead ends.

Strangely,
this production gains its strength from constantly undermining
itself. Just as the detectives, or we, might be crawling towards some
sort of truth, we're teased into confusion again. Countless languages
are squeezed in here – including English, German, Estonian and
Russian – and, whilst the script is sometimes translated, it's
often left hanging. It feels like the production is laughing at us
and our measly attempts at cross-cultural understanding. When the
detectives interrogate a friend of the deceased, they bring in a
Russian interpreter. We can only make out the most basic terms in his
fluent translations and it lends an absurd air to proceedings. This
absurdity is amplified, when we discover the girl isn't even Russian
and that this pathetic attempt at interpretation has been entirely
futile.

Whilst
Stephens' uses his script to play with the audience's instinctive
search for meaning, Nübling
creates a visual landscape thick with misdirections. It's as if
Nübling has transported all
the ambiguity of Stephens' script directly onto the stage. Almost
every line is accompanied by a blitz of bizarre visuals, which rub
against the scene 'proper' in mysterious, tantalizing ways. This
clash between the vocals and visuals is built up slowly. At first, it
comes mainly from the actors' eyes. When the detectives travel to
Germany, the German detective frequently looks directly at the
audience, as if he's challenging us to see things differently. As the
confusion builds, the background performers – who scrub the floor
with glazed eyes and traverse the stage in a endless blur of movement
- all begin to stare out at us. Don't look at the front of the stage,
they seem to be screaming silently. Don't look for the obvious.
Maybe, just maybe, if you look beyond the surface, you might get a
little closer to understanding us and discovering the truth.

As
the detectives move further away from home and become steeped in a
culture they cannot fathom, the stage bleeds with clues they cannot
see and we cannot fully understand. An elusive 'baddy' slides through
the walls, carrying suitcases packed, not with clothes, but with
women. Insistent but hollow music amplifies the script in odd ways,
hinting at pivotal moments the detectives fail to recognise. The
witnesses become stranger and stranger until they are barely human.
They don incredibly lifelike animal masks, alternately predatory
creatures or prey. They become what the British detectives imagine
them to be, the detectives' cultural ignorance only further
complicating their case.

This
play might ostensibly be about sex-trafficking but what it really
explores is our inability – or reluctance – to engage with or
properly interpret other cultures. This is what makes the majority of
those blustering reviews even more misguided, since they are falling
into the very trap this production so ingeniously sets. In a final
scene, an Estonian chap sits down with a British detective and
promises to show him how to create an origami swan. He holds out a
sheet of paper and savagely crumples it. The other detective follows
suit. 'That's not it,' comes back the coolly, frustrated reply. That
swan might be a mess – but it is their own, beautiful mess and it
is our responsibility to translate that mess, as faithfully and
completely as we can.